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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)
On 4 Dec 1996 19:30:18 GMT, joan@med.unc.edu (Joan Shields) wrote:
>
>Uhm, actually, infectious diseases aren't going down - not everywhere.
Infectious disease has gone down sharply, which is why we have a
one-time leap in population from a billion to ten billion.
>Malaria is spreading -
Uh, just exactly what do you mean here? Some white guy caught it, so
it's a disease now? About fity million people a year catch malaria,
and about twenty million die from it. The figure is flat, and the
geographic areas affected are shrinking. More people are exposed to
it, in bad urban water and sewage supplies, but more are protected by
reasonable diet.
The cure for malaria is known: alphalt roads, piped water and sewage,
air conditioned houses. If we could make malaria a serious problem
for white people, no doubt this solution would be implemented toot
sweet.
> the incidence of waterborne disease in the US has
>been on the rise since the 1970s (well over 1 million people a year become
>ill in the US and this number is assumed to be underreported). There are
>many emerging diseases and many reemerging diseases (i.e. Tuberculosis).
>You can check out the CDC web page (http://www.cdc.gov) for more
>information. Of course, then there's the influenza pandemic....
These are all true, but the population of the US is only about 5% of
the whole, so it doesn't matter much. All of these problems are
attributable to the late medieval policies of the government there,
and will be cured in about eight years flat if they ever pull
themselvs into the twentieth century.
>Some things are getting better and some things are getting worse but the
>bottom line is that some things need to change - or else.
Help me get a fix on things: is that a tautology or a redundundancy?
> It won't simply
>be a matter of a few or even many people dying - it'll be a matter of a
>lot of people dying and wholesale degradation of the environment we depend
>so very heavily on. We don't live in a vacumn.
Or a trope? Or maybe just a cliché? Damn but it's difficult to keep
these things straight.
> As for the economics,
>well, we're going to have to pay for it - one way or the other. Money
>isn't the end all, it isn't what gives us a reason for existance. It's a
>tool we use - we need to treat it as such rather than as something more
>important than humans and the environment we live in.
Hey, Joan, you're really good at that stuff. Have you considered a
career with Proctor and Gamble?
Cheers,
-dlj.
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